Photoessay-gallery: the story of sushi

Since you asked, I will share my thoughts. I may come across as negative because I will mainly be talking about things I think ought to be different, so let me start out with a few positives just to prove I actually am paying attention.

The pictures individually hit a lot of very sound notes, often we see strong graphical compositions, almost always excellent figure to ground relationships, etcetera and so on. You know all this stuff, since you put it in there. Also, of course, the story is depicted thoroughly and clearly.

The only remark I have on individual frames is really that you seem to have a lot of centered subjects. I didn’t count, but the feel, to me, was “he’s stuck the dude in the center of the frame again, arrg” and it felt slightly fatiguing. This is a very minor quibble, and could be entirely personal. As I say, I didn’t count, and it may be simply one of those things where I only “noticed” them when they came by because of some trivial quirk in my mood.

I have two areas of comment.

The first is the balance of the overall story. I feel like there’s a lot of “market” and not much else of sushi, the sushi-making at the end feels cursory. I think the whole would be strengthened in one of two ways. 1) by extending the project outwards, show us more sushi-making, more of the ingredients. Going back to a rice-paddy might be pushing it, but you get the idea. OR 2) by tightening in on the fish, and making it more about that, which really means trimming the sushi-making back to a slightly smaller set of very strong, very fish-centric pictures, to make it clear that this is a coda. In general, I feel like the market section could be trimmed slightly. There’s an awful lot of pictures of styrofoam (although, yes, that is one of your points). Again, you could probably go the other way — if the sensation in the market truly is one of “good lord what a hell of a lot of stryofoam” then I’d actually add a few *more* of those pictures, to make the point stand out.

The second is in the way it’s sequenced.

Consider the pictures starting with “Calling out an order”. We have a man framed by some objects in the foreground. The next photo is a woman framed somewhat similarly in her little booth, on the phone. In the next one we have a guy on the phone. Each picture connects in a direct visual way with the next one. I call this “walker evans” sequencing, but it appears in monographs all over, and I don’t even know if Evans invented it.

Those three pictures are a *terrific* sequence.

There’s also the sequence starting with “Expert cuts for minimal wastage” with the repeated motif of the knife. I would rethink the ordering of those 5 pictures to see if the same story could be told with a stronger graphical thrust. I feel like it “wants” to end with the 5 knives resting on the bench alone. I’m not familiar enough with the details of cutting up fish to guess accurately what other orderings might work, obviously you can’t sacrifice the documentary for some graphical pleasantries.

The pairing of “Auction Hall” and “Last batch awaiting shipping out” makes a great frame for the market set, again because of the powerful graphical connection. They are in a way almost the same picture. I think making them both color could emphasize that frame, and/or you could go with some other distiinguishing device. Do you have enough pixels to crop them square? Then you’d have to figure out what to do with the last two pictures of heaps-o-styrofoam.

Occasionally I pick up weaker echoes from one frame to the next, but I’m not picking up a lot of visual interconnection besides what I mentioned. Of course, there may be a ton of stuff I’m not picking up on.

I think you can do better with the black&white versus color than to separate it as “documentary” versus “fish” (see, for instance, my previous remark about framing the market portion of the set). The way the essay reads, it’s not really clear to me what the distinction is. You young person weighing the chunks of fish, for instance, seems to occupy some ambiguous middle ground, as does “Aftermath” from the knife sequence mentioned above.

I think you can do better with something to get you from the market to the sushi counter. I almost want to say “shove in a Toyko skyline” or something, just something to signal “now we are taking a break and moving to a new theme”. I feel like you’re going for that with the last two shots of styrofoam, but those are to me too intimately tied up with the market. We’re still “in the market” and then suddenly someone is making sushi.

This reflects what *I* would do if they were *my* pictures which, obviously, they are not.

Mike Chisholm gave me a wonderful tip once, to go get BookWright from blurb.com and simply use it for sequencing. It’s actually a pretty great tool for that task, and has a pretty shallow learning curve.